PlayStation VR1+2

[...]The benefits of being able to physically look around were made apparent in the two other Morpheus demos. One was a VR-customized level from Eidos Montreal’s Thief. With the help of a DualShock 4 controller to move back and forth, I used my body to control the camera as I navigated through the most familiar kind of Thief settings: a burning mansion. Although this demo had its share of glitches, seeing VR applied to a familiar console/PC game was an effective tease of the possibilities of VR in AAA games.[...]

THIEF

More problematic, and practically a treatise on how conventional game development doesn’t work for VR, is Eidos/Square-Enix’s Thief demo. During Sony’s talk that revealed Project Morpheus, the speakers laid out a roadmap to successful VR experiences. Some of these are that “headtracking is king,” and that taking away control of the player view makes them sick; another is that high frame rate and low latency are priorities. Thief had problems with all three, sacrificing frame rate, low latency, and headtracking for higher-resolution graphics and visual fidelity. The result is incredibly mixed.

Standing still, Thief looks wonderfully moody, with a high degree of detail that every other demo lacks. It is the only game that looked like it belongs on a current-gen roster in terms of its visual style and level of detail. The attendant warned me to try to use the movement controls as much as possible, only to use my right stick for turning and not looking, but even doing this made me nauseous after a short while.

Thief’s low framerate—I heard offhand that it was locked at 30fps, and that VR needs the benchmark of 60fps in order to work properly—makes it look like watching someone play the game through a crappy webcam capture that's sickening the more motion there is in frame. Even using the controller to turn creates a slight sense of vertigo, and there seems to be a slight delay between when I try to move or look and the action, increasing the problems.

Visually, Thief looks great-ish, though it has the exact texture/shader problem that The Castle developers works to avoid. The stony environments have an odd particle-board look to them, of a plastic un-reality, like looking up-close at a plastic bench painted to look like stone. The flame effects also has a very two-dimensional look, like someone had a moving cardboard cutout of flames that lacks any dimensionality to them (though it did have some nice smoke and spark particle effects).

Thief, in trying to create a higher-definition look, succeeds in the appearance of greater fidelity in its 2D textures. But everything looks like a plastic toy-set painted to look real if you squint or shut one eye. It highlights a number of problems that VR presents the industry, since rendering the images separately for both eyes requires a great deal of processing power.

[...] "The indie teams typically want to create something not directly competitive with big companies because they know they don't have the resource to do it, so they try to come up with a new angle or approach, a new experience so that their game can stand out," continued Yoshida.

"And that approach is perfect for making VR, because that's what we need. We don't want people to think, 'How can I port this game to VR?' We want people to think, 'What unique thing can we do with this tech?' So I'm very, very excited to give lots of units to indie PS4 developers."